Samuel Beckett on Bram van Velde

“[Bram van Velde's work] is a painting without precedent, in which as in no other I find what I am seeking, precisely because of this fidelity to the prison-house, this refusal of any probationary freedom.”

“[Bram van Velde] is the first to repudiate relation in all these forms. It is not the relation with this or that order of opposite that it refuses. But the state of being in relation as such, the state of being in front of. We have waited for a long time for an artist who is brave enough, is at ease enough with the great tornadoes if intuition, to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world, that there are no replacement relations for naive relations, that what are called outside and inside are one and the same.”